Many states have passed laws which mandate the use of a child safety seat for children up to the age of four years old. In recent years, an increasing number of vehicles have been equipped with passenger-side airbags with the expectation that all automobiles produced in the United States will be so equipped, and by 1999, passenger-side airbags will be federally mandated for all new vehicles, including light trucks.
Although child seat manufacturers routinely warn purchasers to secure the child safety seat in the center of the rear-seat when there is an airbag in the car, it is not uncommon for the seat to be placed in the front, passenger-side seat. For the sake of safety alone, if not for passenger side airbag, then rearfacing infants should be placed in the front seat to avoid distractions from the back seat which contribute to crashes and to allow for infant driver eye contact thus adding to the infant's feeling of security. That not withstanding, the failure to follow the manufacturer's instructions presents a serious safety risk to an infant in a rearfacing safety seat positioned in front of a passenger side air bag.
A significant body of data has shown that the interaction between a rear facing infant seat and a front passenger-side airbag can result in excessive head and chest acceleration, causing serious and perhaps fatal injury to an infant occupant. For example, the airbag/seat interaction produces accelerations of an infant's head exceeding 100 G's at bag impact and Head Injury Criterion (HIC) values ranging from 650 to 1300. By contrast, rear facing seats not experiencing airbag interaction produce head accelerations of about 50 G's and HIC values less than 1000 and generally around 650 when crash tested at a standardized test speed of 48 km/hr, even though the Child Restraint Air Bag Interaction (CRABI) task force recommends 390 HIC as the top acceptable number for infant safety.
Infants are usually transported in rear facing car seats, and as the infant grows and becomes larger, they are typically migrated into forward facing car seats. Usually this requires the purchase of a new car seat. Additionally, as the infant grows he or she may outgrow the first forward facing car seat, requiring the purchase of another, larger sized forward facing car seat.
It would therefore be desirable to provide a child safety seat that will protect a child when the safety seat is installed in the front passenger-side seat in a vehicle which may or may not be equipped with a passenger side airbag, and to provide a child safety seat that is convertible from a rearward facing position to a forward facing position and that can accommodate the child as the child grows.